PTSD—Or, I'm Still Doomscrolling
collage created by Max Kuzma
Many times in my life I have experienced a feeling of looking in from the outside. I felt it when I was a child watching little girls play with dolls or talk about boys and having no interest in those things. I felt it as an adult at the weddings of Catholic friends, knowing my queer identity would prevent me from ever standing on that same altar. And I felt it when Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and President Biden was sworn in on January 20th and I watched many of my liberal and queer friends rejoice--I wasn’t ready to let my guard down.
This distance I have felt comes largely from my identity, since my inner life never followed the script that was provided by the catholic world. But there’s something else at play: religious PTSD from the way Catholics have treated me.
One of the biggest problems with any religion is the members. A quote often attributed to Ghandi goes something like, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” The common defense to this, or to any perceived criticism levied at the church, is that one stays for God, not for people. Further, in Catholicism you stay for the Eucharist, which is a sacrament that only a Catholic priest is able to provide and no other denomination will do for the real deal.
I have heard all manner of unkind things said about the kind of person and kind of Catholic that I am (and, for that matter, the kind of Catholic Joe Biden is). Fellow Catholics have said things like… I’m mentally ill, that I’m going to hell (creative, right?), that I can’t call myself Catholic, and that I am broken and wounded and only God can help me, not medicine or science.
How do people end up in abusive or toxic relationships? Obviously not overnight. What happens is two main things. First, the abusive partner doesn’t start out that way. They hide their true nature by promising to be the fulfillment of the other person’s hopes and dreams. Second, the other partner gets carried away by the idea of their own hopes and dreams for a relationship and those visions blind them to the lived reality of how they’re being treated.
This creates a perfect storm where realizing the truth—which is that you have trapped yourself with someone who is in fact hindering you from reaching those hopes, dreams, and goals—is more painful than continuing along with the lie. And so it’s easier to stay, rather than break free and be true to yourself.
Here’s what happens with religion. You are taught that your hopes and dreams in life (eternal salvation and the guarantee of God’s love) require following rules, and further you will be checked up on by other members—if not in a literal way (a la your parents and Catholic school), then socially (through the Catholic community you live in / work with). I was always surrounded by other catholics, which meant I was always surrounded by people who would counter or check any thought or idea I articulated that disagreed with their idea of how a catholic should be or act.
This is how you end up with people who have the audacity to call Biden a bad catholic and assert that he should be excommunicated and that he’s going to hell. All this for a man that the Pope has accepted as the new, valid President and for someone who is acting in a secular role. The people who are calling him the antichrist are people who want to live in a Catholic monarchist political system (a theocracy of some kind) where their moral ideas are the only ones tolerated.
You may have heard the saying “he’s sharing his truth.” I have heard many Catholics who rip this concept to shreds because “there’s only one truth!” In their myopic, grade-school level literacy they fail to take into account that “sharing your truth” is so important precisely because it often challenges systems of power and authority. A voice that shares these kinds of things can not be tolerated long by any entity that seeks to hold on to power, and yet Jesus Christ was a person who constantly sought out those kinds of voices to listen to him.
Radically conservative alt-right Catholics on twitter are the kind of people who would have stoned the woman at the well who Jesus went and listened to, and loved.
It’s not okay, and for people like me, engaging with these kinds of catholics puts me in a state of high alert because I’ve experienced this before. I have been told not to trust my own intuition, my own feelings, and my own body (all God given, I might add—including my conscience).
Openly queer Catholics are too controversial for the “moderates and centrists” who are happy to share a table with the alt right traditionalists, fundamentalists, and monarchists. Nevermind this laissez faire attitude towards queer people is putting us through years of torment and in some cases resulting in our death because the church neglects any kind of rigorous accountability or actual pastoral love and care for queer people. But that’s not an issue for your friends “in the middle” because it doesn’t affect them personally. They’re perfectly safe changing their profile to a black square and distancing themselves from a group like BLM specifically, since the far right side doesn’t like them, all-the-while granting the least amount of respect to people of color and other minorities that they can possibly get away with because they don’t really, genuinely want to change anything—the status quo serves them as white, cis-gender heterosexuals.
I’m speaking harshly from personal experience witnessing these behaviors and arguments first hand. What’s even worse is the deafening silence from catholics who may not agree with any of this but literally never speak up, the equivalent of throwing your vote away when in this case standing up for the living and breathing LGBTQ+ members of their community could very easily save a life.
We have to do better for this community, and we must stop the cycle of trauma perpetuated by people who don’t want you to make waves in their wading pool. Of course the system is fine for people who aren’t suffering under it. But acting like everyone is fine hurts people even more because it isolates people who are suffering, making them think they’re alone in their pain and their seeming inability to be a good catholic... which in turn increases their suffering even more. This is not okay and it’s one of the main reasons I speak up and share my experiences as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.